


Silent

by verucasalt123



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Boys Kissing, M/M, Minor Violence, curse words, references to character deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-05
Updated: 2013-03-05
Packaged: 2017-12-04 09:12:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/709065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verucasalt123/pseuds/verucasalt123
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spike's reaction to the aftermath of NFA and Angel's attempts to help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silent

**Author's Note:**

> This is literally the very first piece of fanfic I ever wrote. So it might suck. But this was the story that got me started, so I'm sharing it.

Spike had been silent since the alley. Obviously silent was uncharacteristic for him, but you just never knew how someone (even a vampire) would react to such loss. Illyria had gone still and reverted to Fred’s form, which had been personally returned to her parents. They’d offered their thanks, but with more than a hint of blame behind their words. Gunn had left a request for cremation, so together he and Angel had placed him on a pyre and stood there to watch their friend burn. To turn to ash, both of them half-wishing it had been them as ash instead. Angel had buried Wes himself. Made the wood coffin, laid the man’s stabbed body inside, dug the grave with a shovel, marked it with ancient symbols to describe his strength and courage, but not with his name, which had been given to him by parents he had not bothered to call, parents who didn’t love him nearly as much as these two undead men had loved him. A Watcher was supposed to be buried with a stake through his heart, but Angel didn’t follow that tradition. The Watcher’s Council had turned its back on his Wesley years ago, and even if they hadn’t Angel wouldn’t have been able to defile his beautiful body like that anyway. Spike went to sit at that grave more times than could be counted, sometimes with Angel at his side, never discussing it when one of them cried and the other offered comfort with solid arms and chest and shoulders to lean into.

After a few weeks of his very best efforts, Angel could still only get perfunctory words from Spike. Even deliberate attempts couldn’t coax a “sod off” or a “go fuck yourself ya ponce” from him. Nods, yeses and nos, shrugs of marble shoulders, brief eye contact when offering blood for sustenance were all that Spike would return, no matter what Angel would say or do.

The possibility of trying to talk him through it, get Spike to open up emotionally by laying bare their shared grief and waiting for him to gradually come around, was zero. Hundreds of years of experience had clearly demonstrated that would be an ineffective method. The way to bring him out, Angel knew, was to piss him off. Badly.

So Angel started bringing him the newspaper. Just sports. There were still sports, of course; even after the narrowly avoided apocalypse, the whole world wasn’t destroyed, and it wasn’t like basketball or hockey were going anywhere. Angel looked in on Spike, who’d mostly confined himself to his room these days, and watched for any sign of interest as Spike leafed through the sports pages. There were times when it was clear he was just staring and scanning, expression the completely blank slate that had been there for all this time, and there were times when Angel could tell he was reading some of the articles. Only subtle signs, a raised eyebrow or a sneer or a whispered curse word, but if anyone could recognize those signs, it was Angel. Not because of his heightened vampiric senses but because they had known each other, hated each other and loved each other going on a hundred and fifty years now.

When fall came, and American football swung in, Angel hoped there would be something that would get a reaction. Spike hated American football, hated that the Americans called it football, thought it was a ridiculous game anyway, and had ranted extensively on the subject in the past. 

As it turned out, the football did the trick, got Angel his wish for Spike to start speaking again. Not in the way he had expected, though maybe he should have anticipated it, knowing his boy’s endearing love for so many intrinsically human things like hot wings and scotch and nicotine. The light patina of humanity that clung to Spike after all these years was one of the things his surrogate sire and occasional friend and sometime lover had always found so endearing. Angel had briefly acknowledged but barely noticed when he had read earlier the small article at the bottom of page three, appearing several weeks into the season, almost October now, about a change in the rules that had nothing to do with this game that Spike despised, but with one of the venues thousands of miles from Los Angeles. But it happened to be one of the times that Spike was not scanning, not leafing through, as Angel listened at the closed door to the room, and he smiled in grateful astonishment as he heard rumblings and movement and angry words and immediately knew why. He could almost hear Spike’s brain forming the thoughts.

This day’s article, practically hidden and not even real news for fucking stupid American football, which the yanks should have named something else, assholes, wasn’t really even talking about the bloody game, which was fine, because it was a stupid game. Ericsson Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina ( _Really????? North Carolina is doing this? Hypocritical tossers._ ) had banned smoking. Actually banned it. Never mind you had to pay a fortune just for a ticket and couldn’t light up in the seat you’d shelled out upwards of $200 for the privilege of sitting in so you could watch these poofs with their overgrown pads and helmets and oh, by the way, ought to put the quarterback in a fucking skirt so it would be more obvious that you weren’t allowed to hit the nance. Designated smoking areas in the stadium had been eliminated. Smoking areas in the sodding parking lot had been eliminated. If you wanted to have yourself a smoke, you’d have to sit through the entire fucking game, get out into the lot, get in your car, sit with all the other cars trying to get out onto the interstate and THEN, when you were off their property, you could commit the cardinal sin of pulling your silver lighter from the pocket of your duster. Projecting, obviously, because Spike would not be one of those people and neither his lighter NOR his duster would ever be in that lot. 

But that’s what broke the dam. Angel sighed with relief when he heard some piece of furniture, probably an end table or dresser, being smashed to bits in Spike’s room, along with the centuries-old familiar sound of the profanity-laden tirade directed at no one. Angel stood outside the door and listened to Spike scream at the _injustice_ , the _hypocrisy_ , the _entitlement_ , the **bloody nerve** of these corporate assholes who thought they could control the actions of every person (or non-person) who handed them a wad of cash for the opportunity to walk past those two panther statues, to tell them they couldn’t fucking LIGHT A CIGARETTE in the vicinity of the twenty two men on the field who were actively trying to break each other’s bones and take off each other’s heads. 

The door wasn’t locked, not that it would have made a difference if it had been. Angel opened it and watched for the moments that his presence wasn’t acknowledged. Suddenly, the fury that had been unleashed on the furniture was turned on him. He stolidly accepted the beating, the punches and steel-toed boot kicks until he was prone on the floor of the room and waited as Spike exhausted himself and sank to the ground next to him weeping and reached for the bleeding and damaged body there next to him.

Angel put his arms around him, and kissed him, and at last met no resistance against Spike’s mouth, and held him there, licking and biting for the first time since the alley. 

“Sodding – fucking – stupid – yanks”, finally, WORDS, actual words, and Angel smiled in a bittersweet thanks for so many things – for the sound of his voice, for the feel of his lips, for the best gift Dru had ever given him, for Spike’s love of human comforts that he’d never lost in over a hundred years, as he kissed away the tears and put his arms around his boy and held him close and hard for the first time in months.


End file.
